[grayhatter]

coke cola used to have cocaine in it, it doesn't anymore, people in taste tests prefer the taste of Pepsi... Coke is still the leader in sales.

Infinite scroll doesn't have a positive UX. If it takes an infinite amount of time to use your product, your product is shit.

Unless your product is content, in which case endless scroll encourages thoughtless consumption behavior. That's not a good thing.

We as engineers shouldn't be building stuff that degrades the experience of existence (which is already shit enough), just because you can make money doing so doesn't mean it's not antisocial behavior, and because you can make money by being a really shitty human, it does require some external force to curtail that negative sum behavior.

I agree it's difficult to categorize, the solution is rapid iteration, not allowing the asshattery until the entirety of society figures out it's bad for your brain. Someone should probably fix the political system in the US so we can have rapid iteration on problems again.

[iamnothere]

Rapid iteration on political issues is how you end up with oppression and legal terrorism. The brakes are there for a reason. But so is the valid process for changing the fundamental system (amendments).

[grayhatter]

I don't think rapid iteration causes legal terrorism. Do you have an example, or just vibes?

I meant rapid as in rapid for the legislative context too. I don't mind slow (expected) speed, or laws that have a delay before they take effect. I do have a problem with how political points can and are won not by finding solutions, but exclusively by obstructing the process. I don't mind an imperfect solution that moves the needle into a new better local maximum.

[iamnothere]

Perhaps I should clarify, I am using “legal terrorism” as a term of art for legislative terror, such as that inflicted during the French Revolution or the reign of Oliver Cromwell, or Germany’s Enabling Act. Without strong checks, which slow down the process, legislative bodies can get caught up in a frenzy of passing laws in order to address “urgent” problems.

Our problem is that a majority of legislators want to pass laws that they aren’t allowed to pass, although at cross purposes from each other, but they don’t want to go through the process for changing what they’re allowed to do. (Which may simply be evidence that the system is working as expected.)

We also have a problem with general legislative gridlock, entirely due to self-imposed rules that Congress isn’t willing to change. (Interestingly enough, however, the people could force a change through an amendment here too.)

[inigyou]

Another alternative to avoid legal terrorism is low penalties. If the law would rapidly shift to say infinite scroll is illegal, but the only penalty is being ordered to remove it (and then penalised more if you fail to do so after being notified) I don't think that's really that bad?

[iamnothere]

You’d need a Constitution that allows laws regarding speech. And probably a mechanism to prevent legislators from assigning excessive penalties.

It’s not about whether the law meets some abstract notion of good or bad, it’s about whether it is even possible to enact under the framework that governs us. Under the Constitution as it stands, it wouldn’t be possible.

[tpdly]

Not true. Speech and reach are obviously different.

It is entirely conceivable that Americans wake up to the absurd power and manipulation behind algorithmic feeds, and decide to intervene in the hypno-addictive horror-show.

Also, I've been thinking about how curation at the scale of the modern internet is much more analogous to speech than it ever was before. Whatever you want to say, just find someone else who's said it-- or just astroturf via 3rd party and beam it into the skinner boxes. In this frame, freedom of speech actually demands open access to indeces and content. Is it acceptable that network-effect-fueled cartels are the only ones that get to speak through algorithms?

[inigyou]

Let's not get too distracted from the fact that good things are good and bad things are bad.